About AdRoll
AdRoll is a marketing and advertising platform that helps brands grow revenue and save time on one streamlined platform.
🎯 The challenge
AdRoll, a pioneering force in retargeting ad tech, faced a challenge during the 'Scale' stage of growth: to maximize returns, they needed new tools and processes. The growth team, led by Peter Clark, played a crucial role in making this happen for the company, which had over 500 employees.
🏆 The solution
To tackle the structural restraints of the growth team, Peter wanted to make small-scale product improvements without relying on the engineering team. Initially, they considered creating an in-house solution, but then Appcues emerged as a solution—providing an effective way to experiment with user communications.
“We were pretty close to building a tool to create and launch modals into AdRoll ourselves! We hadn’t scoped much of the internal tool yet, but I remember starting down the rabbit hole of requirements and finding that the list grew intimidating really quickly. Hurdles like user targeting, permissioning and analytics made the build vs buy decision easy.”
👀 How they did it
1. Investing in in-app announcements
AdRoll invested in Appcues, arming 18 team members with the power of in-app communication. They got started by deploying 33 flows targeted at various user segments. The growth team utilized Appcues for all sorts of in-app announcements, from encouraging feature adoption to scheduling onboarding sessions and announcing new platform integrations.
“With Appcues, our PMs and PMMs are able to create flows themselves. It doesn’t take engineering work, and it doesn’t really take creative work. Appcues is very “drag and drop.” It’s super simple and creating modals takes like 15 minutes rather than a few days.”
2. Improving feature adoption with active users
With their speedy adoption of Appcues humming along, AdRoll turned their attention to an underutilized integration: MailChimp. The integration had low adoption and a flat growth rate. Peter's team isolated users of AdRoll and Mailchip and then passed the data to Appcues for targeting. The team was especially excited to target an active set customers who were missing out on a key value.
“If you’re putting something in your app, you’re only getting your active people...You’re not sending it out as an email and getting unsubs and pissing people off. And that’s why we’re so keen about in-app messages.”
3. Expanding reach out-of-platform
Afterwards, the team sent an email to users who didn’t see the flow to make sure they didn’t miss the message.
✅ Results
The MailChimp integration announcement yielded a remarkable 60% adoption rate, with thousands of users converting after viewing the flow.
This single modal flow empowered AdRoll users to activate the integration, broaden their target audience for ads, and ultimately spend more money with AdRoll.
AdRoll has mimicked this success across dozens of other campaigns, such as creating conversion segments, launching Facebook retargeting campaigns, and of course, driving adoption for their dozens of other CRM Retargeting Integrations.
As Peter remarked, “on average, 20% of people that see our Appcues modals go on and complete the goal no matter the nature of it, which is an insanely high completion rate especially when it comes to forms.” Given its direct outcomes on their user behaviors, Peter and his team continue using and experimenting with Appcues for all kinds of growth initiatives.
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Our hot take
We hear from a lot of prospects considering Appcues that they’re noodling on building a solution in-house. But as AdRoll discovered, there’s a lot more that goes into in-app messaging than meets the eye. It's better to have engineers focus on adding value to the product while non-technical experts focus on growing the business. Peter said it best, “in the end, investing in Appcues was a drop in the bucket. At this point, it has probably saved us months of engineering time.” Way to go, team!